Popeye problem

kazneerg

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My Popeye finally went. This is what it displays now. Before, it would display this now and then when powered up. I would simply turn it off, wait a few seconds, and power it back up, and things would be fine again. Not this time.
I checked the power supply and the board is getting the 5v. I believe that's all the board uses, outside of the 24v that goes to the coin door, for the coin meter?
I tried to reseat all the eproms(twice), and checked all the harness connections(even the ribbon cables) to make sure they were seated well. I also looked over all the solder connections on the solder side of the boards to see if there were any cracked solder joints. Every thing looked good. This is beyond the scope of my knowledge now. Does anyone know what it might be? Any insight would be appreciated. Thanks.

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Sorry to resurrect an old thread, but I just got a Popeye cocktail that has this exact same issue. The screen image looks exactly like the one in the first post. The "service mode" tests say that everything is fine. So I took the advice here and swapped in a known good z80, but that didn't help me. I get the exact same results. (I'm assuming that the z80 and game CPU system doesn't run the service mode tests so that is why they work properly?)

One thing that I did notice is that if I flip the switch off and then turn it on again quickly so that the monitor is instantly back on (instead of fading in over the first few seconds as it does after it has been off for a bit), the garbage text seems to change once within the first fraction of a second. I'm not sure if that is meaningful or not.

Anyhow, I'd greatly appreciate any advice from you experts on where to look next. Thanks!
 
Thanks to both of you for the super fast advice! I already tried to reseat the inter-board ribbon cables, and it made no difference. The z80 socket looks good also, but I have not yet gone over it pin by pin with a continuity tester. I try to do that tomorrow.

Based on an older post here, I did a few more off-on cycles where I paid more close attention to the change. I'm now 95% certain that the initial garbage text is inverted (facing player 2 controls) initially and then fips to face the player 1 side. I'm not sure if the entire text is the same in both modes. However, if I focus right after the power-on, I can see that there are some characters that are upside down from the player 1 side for a fraction of a second. Then when the screen content changes, all recognizable characters are right side up from the player 1 point of view. Does that tell us anything more helpful? Does the game CPU do this inversion or does it come from somewhere else?
 
Sorry for the delayed response on this. I've been "under the weather" here for a few days and wasn't able to check out the machine. However, now that I'm feeling better, I've done some more testing. Here's what I've learned, and I hoping that some of you experts can shed some light.

* I reseated all the socketed chips on the CPU board (Z80, heat-sinked CPU, ROMs, and small chips near the bottom). That didn't change anything.

* I watched the video on boot up very closely over several cycles and concluded 100% that the garbage text comes up facing AWAY from the Player 1 side and then flips to face TOWARD the Player 1 side after a fraction of a second. I'm 90% sure that the garbage text is the same both before and after the flip (just flipped). Also, this text appears to be EXACTLY the same on each reboot. (So it isn't just random uninitialized garbage in the video RAM unless someone is initializing that RAM to known garbage somehow?)

* I removed the z80 entirely and repeated the power up experiments and found that the text didn't invert at all. In fact, other garbage text was there and is almost sorta "pulsed" a little. Definitely a very different behavior than before so that z80 is clearly doing something useful.

* I was playing with the "self-test" switch and found that sometimes on a cold boot it will say "RAM 7H NG". If I power cycle it again, it will come up saying "RAM 7H OK" and then move on with the rest of the test. In that case everything passes with flying colors. (Of course, the game itself still doesn't play.) I can power cycle over and over at that point and always seem to get the "7H OK" results. I'm wondering if the RAM chip is bad. Could that cause this type of behavior? I wonder how thorough that self-test is for the RAM chip. Is it possible that the self-test isn't very demanding and that the RAM fails 100% on game startup but a weak test fails to see the problem most of the time (except maybe on cold boot)? Of course, to make matters harder, that silly RAM 7H (TMM2016) is about the only serious chip NOT socketed on my board. :( Is there any way to test it before trying to pull it and put in another? Can one get a TMM2016 2kB 200ns somewhere these days? I'm honestly not much of a soldier guru, it looks fairly reasonable to replace if I had a strong indicator that it was the problem and could get a replacement reasonably. (Thinking out loud, unless the self-test for that RAM is quite weak, I would think that it giving a positive result 99% of the time would at least allow the game to start up occassionally. Is that logical or am I thinking badly?)

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this. I'd love to have it working again soon, and with a little insight from the experts here, I'm sure that I can. :)
 
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I appreciate the reply, and I have bought some misc. parts from Mike's in the past. However, he doesn't seem to have that RAM chip listed specifically. Any other important items on there that I should be looking at?
 
Anyone have any advice for me here? Should I try to replace that RAM chip? Does that sound likely to be the culprit? Anyone have a reasonable source to get a replacement RAM? Alternately, does anyone have a cheap source of a new CPU board (or complete boardset) for Popeye? (Aside from watching eBay, of course. ;-))
 
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